Between Prague Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960-1980

By Martin Klimke

Abandoning the usual Cold War–oriented narrative of postwar European protest and opposition movements, this volume offers an innovative, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive perspective on two decades of protest and social upheaval in postwar Europe. It examines the mutual influences and interactions among dissenters in Western Europe, the Warsaw Pact countries, and the nonaligned European countries, and shows how ideological and political developments in the East and West were interconnected through official state or party channels as well as a variety of private and clandestine contacts. Focusing on issues arising from the cross-cultural transfer of ideas, the adjustments to institutional and political frameworks, and the role of the media in staging protest, the volume examines the romanticized attitude of Western activists to violent liberation movements in the Third World and the idolization of imprisoned RAF members as martyrs among left-wing circles across Western Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780857451071

Book preview

Introduction

Martin Klimke, Jacco Pekelder,

and Joachim Scharloth

From 28 July until 6 August 1968, Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, staged the 9th World Youth Festival. In the middle of the Cold War, 20,000 visitors from more than 130 countries poured into the city to celebrate the unity of Communist and socialist youth across the globe. Events, however, would soon make a mockery of the festival’s motto, For Solidarity, Peace, and Friendship, and turn Sofia into a showcase of ideological divisions among the Left in East and West.¹

Signs of discord emerged as early as the opening ceremony in Sofia’s Vasil Levski National Stadium when the West German delegation chanted Dubček, Dubček as they passed the dignitaries’ loge. This provoked severe consternation among Bulgarian officials, who did not look kindly upon the Czechoslovak Communist leader’s reform efforts.

Tensions continued to mount when the Bulgarian secret police tried to prevent a demonstration against the Vietnam War that West German SDS president Karl-Dietrich Wolff had called for. Pushed away from the local U.S. embassy, Wolff gave a speech standing on a wall of the nearby Georgi Dimitrov Mausoleum, in which he denounced Bulgaria’s political censorship and the lack of free and open exchange during the festival. Among other things, he derided the prohibition on carrying portraits of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, or Mao Zedong.

The situation escalated a few days later, when a Bulgarian delegate compared Wolff to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels after the German SDS leader had complained about the manipulation of the list of speakers. As an indignant Wolff stormed to the podium, other Bulgarians caught him and dragged him out of the building, smashing his glasses in the process. Thereafter, turmoil erupted. Delegates from Belgium, Denmark, Great Britain, Italy, Sweden, and the Netherlands left the scene in protest. Disregarding traditional Cold War allegiances, participants from Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia followed suit.²

That delegates from these two Communist countries joined their Western counterparts in protest not only reveals the ideological rifts among the young, organized Left at the end of the 1960s. It also highlights the gap between the party line and political attitudes at the grassroots level. Moreover, the events in Sofia illustrate that conflicts emerging from this gap between political expectations and reality among the younger generation were not confined to the liberal democracies of the West, but were also fought out within and among the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. Opponents of established political dogmas and power structures on both sides of the Iron Curtain occasionally even overcame the limitations imposed by their national contexts and joined forces with their peers in other countries against perceived oppression and injustice at home and abroad.

This transnational quality of postwar European protest movements sits at the heart of this volume. Despite the overwhelming flow of publications that have paid homage to the rebelliousness of the sixties or 1968 in recent years, many historians have argued for a comprehensive perspective on popular political participation in postwar Europe that questions traditional Cold War narratives and their often narrow focus on political history.³ Among other things, they point to the continued prevalence of national viewpoints, despite the blossoming of historical research on this period. In fact, such national perspectives may have even become more dominant over the years, especially since, in some cases, historical research has just begun, as archival material that was previously classified has just recently been released, only now affording scholars an opportunity to freely study this period.⁴ In other countries, the 1960s (or 1968) have by now become part of national cultures of remembrance, with fitting lieux de mémoires like the attack on Rudi Dutschke in Berlin, the occupation of the Sorbonne University in Paris, the teach-ins at Berkeley, and the White Bicycle plans of the Amsterdam Provos. These historical events and their corresponding sites have developed into foundational narratives with both positive and negative connotations.⁵ They range from national myths of rejuvenation, proclaiming the birth of a new society with a more open and democratic political culture and greater equality between the sexes, to the end of a period of liberalization and the advent of domestic orthodoxy and dogma. In other words, the increase of research and remembrance on a national level has frequently come to overshadow the global dimension and transnational roots of the protests.

In response, ever more studies on the 1960s/1970s reinforce the search for connections and comparisons between these different national contexts, viewing the respective protests not only as parallel but interconnected phenomena on the global playing field of the Cold War.⁶ Such studies stress the common inspirations and global backgrounds of the protest movements in different countries and have begun to focus on interactions and the transfers of ideas, protest repertoires, etc., between these movements. Although we acknowledge the crucial need for empirical studies on the local level, as well as the pervasive and often dominant impact of national factors, we nonetheless wish for this volume to contribute to a broader perspective in three ways.

First, the volume connects the historical research of this period to the transnational turn in the social sciences.⁷ Stressing the global causes of the social upheavals in the 1960s/70s, it focuses on sub- or non-state actors operating across borders (transnational ones), distinguishing these from international (state-to-state) contacts. To this end, it brings together case studies from Western Europe, the Warsaw Pact countries, and the nonaligned European countries, stretching from roughly 1960 to 1980. Without negating the fundamental differences between the political and social systems in different parts of the continent, the volume thus tries to examine the mutual influences and interactions among protest movements across Europe’s great divide, as well as their communication and cooperation with and perception of other global forces. Its aim is to give voice to a new generation of scholars who seek to establish a more comprehensive, European perspective that explores the impact the Cold War division had on the emergence of social protest within different national contexts and on the continent as a whole.

Second, and partly as a consequence of this transnational perspective, the contributions assembled in this collection are meant to broaden the chronological scope of research on the 1960s and 1968. Although the volume ends with an international chronology of 1968—in recognition of the intriguing density of events in that fateful year and as a way to show the diversity of events across the continent—the narratives of the individual articles shy away from traditional periodizations. Instead of reducing the decade’s transformations to the single (though metaphorical) year of 1968 as the year that rocked the world, many of our authors take a long-term view, perceiving a long transitional period, which began—at least in some countries—in the middle of the 1950s and did not end before the mid- or (sometimes) late 1970s. They either embed their analysis of specific events of 1968 in this larger conceptual framework or describe long-term trends, like leftist attitudes toward the nation in Denmark and Sweden throughout this period. Including genealogies and/or consequences of events and developments, they paint a picture of the longue durée of postwar European protest movements.

Third, and building on this long sixties perspective, the volume seeks to broaden not only the geographical scope but also the disciplinary base of research on this period. Bringing together scholars from the fields of history, cultural studies, linguistics, as well as media and communication studies, this volume is able to overcome the artificial and narrow focus on political history. For example, combining the insights of political history with analyses of cultural practices, rhetoric, and media representations, our approach is able to take specific local and national conditions of dissent into account and reevaluate traditional dichotomies of success and failure regarding the legacies of this era.

Based on these three principles, the articles in this volume offer a portrait of a coat of many colors, paying tribute to the transitional character of the societal transformations of the era, while at the same time acknowledging the immense diversity of developments all over Europe. To guide readers through this multi-faceted story, we have arranged the essays into four sections dedicated to politics, protest cultures, the media-staging of protest, and discourses of liberation and violence.

As the first section, Politics between East and West, demonstrates, international events and power relations had a substantial impact on the formulation of domestic dissent. The year 1956, for example—Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Soviet Communist Party Congress, Soviet tanks rolling into Hungary to put down a nationwide uprising, and the British-French war with Egypt over the Suez Canal—profoundly shaped the political attitudes of people all over Europe. Holger Nehring’s contribution shows that precisely this year was the defining moment for the New Left in Great Britain. In Nehring’s view, the extremely heterogeneous groups that are traditionally subsumed under this label largely grew out of disillusionment with the Soviet Union. As a result, a reform movement of British communism emerged, which both sought and called itself a New Left. It combined the emancipatory aspects of the socialist tradition with an attempt to make the geopolitical reality of the Cold War a personal reality and topic of public debate, envisioning Great Britain to be a role model of nonalignment and positive neutralism. Although its members disagreed about protest techniques and the details of its ideological direction, the British New Left clearly illustrates the impact of international events on domestic social change and the convergence of a transnational mission with national roots.

Inside the Eastern European bloc, the long-term impact of 1956 and the thaw initiated by Khrushchev also created limited space for political dissent. Zdenek Nebrensky demonstrates how Czechoslovak students were able to articulate their dissatisfaction at a party conference on higher education in 1963, well before the Prague Spring. Analyzing the congress, he reveals how party officials provided a framework for the expression of dissent among the domestic youth, who seized upon this opening to challenge the restrictive public sphere. The Czechoslovak students were very aware of cultural trends popular among youth in other Eastern and Western European countries, even if they often knew these trends only as mediated by their Polish peers. Their demands for reform with respect to the private sphere, social equality, and validation of their work thus indicated the influence these transnational discourses had on their criticism of the domestic system.

The interplay between international events and domestic ideologies also stretched to other parts of Europe. In Denmark and Sweden, as Thomas Jørgensen points out, the national liberation movements of the Third World and the global student revolt of the 1960s particularly affected the Left. Interestingly, in both countries, these international developments brought about a revival of national sentiments on the Left in the 1970s, together with an increasing focus on the working class. This analysis depicts a remarkable transformation of Left politics within two decades.

The interconnectedness of political change in Western and Eastern Europe also affected party reactions to domestic dissent. Maud Bracke’s contribution on the reaction of the French Communist Party (PCF) to the Paris May events in 1968 reveals that the PCF was caught between its adherence to orthodox revolutionary concepts, its domestic ambitions, and its submission to the Soviet Union’s party line. Bracke suggests that the Soviet Union subordinated the PCF to its larger foreign policy interests by favoring Gaullism and by using pressure on the party to try to sabotage the pro-Atlantic, center-left coalition under François Mitterrand. Combined with the internal flaws of the PCF, this circumstance made the party more distant from student protesters, and prompted it to rapidly realign with the Soviet position after the violent end of the Prague Spring.

Perhaps the most striking illustration in terms of ideological positions between East and West was Yugoslavia, which fully subscribed to neither side. As Boris Kanzleiter elaborates, the Yugoslavian leadership was probably the only governing elite that interpreted the student revolt in its country as a confirmation of its own policies. In Yugoslavia, which, as a nonaligned nation, was open to influences from both Cold War ideological blocs, students could identify with the dissent of their peers in the East and the West on the grounds of their own experiences. Their simultaneous opposition against both Stalinism and capitalism was encapsulated in the popular slogan Down With the Red Bourgeoisie! Nevertheless, Tito eventually prosecuted them for their actions, which had increasingly gone beyond the party’s control.

The geopolitical divisions of the Cold War, however, were not alone in influencing oppositional movements in Europe and domestic responses to them. The contributions in our second section, Protest Without Borders: Recontextualization of Protest Cultures, focus on the transnational exchange of cultural practices within the protest movements and the historical, linguistic, and spatial factors that shaped them in the receiving country. For the case of the Netherlands, Rimko van der Maar illustrates how the legacies of World War II stamped domestic discussions about U.S. involvement in Vietnam in two ways: on one hand, the American liberation of the Netherlands from Nazi occupation and the close transatlantic partnership between the countries after the war made people hesitant to voice criticism. On the other hand, when U.S. actions in Vietnam were compared to World War II war crimes and bombings, it struck a chord, sparking broad-based anti-war sentiment. Furthermore, the appropriation of American anti-war slogans directed against U.S. President Johnson posed a legal problem that even provoked debates in parliament, since a provision in Dutch law, dating back to 1816, prohibited public defamation of a friendly head of state.

The significance of national dispositions in the transfer of protest techniques is underlined by the language and diction of dissent. Andreas Rothenhöfer’s investigation of activist discourse about the global dimension of 1960s/70s protest and how it is informed by national backgrounds makes this very clear. Analyzing the linguistic tools that were used to integrate international models into West German protest discourse and the specific national connotations they included, Rothenhöfer points to the crucial role of linguistic idiosyncrasies in the transmission process by exploring the usage of concepts such as world, society, Volk, and German.

The contributions by Timothy Brown and Sebastian Haumann highlight the spatial dimensions of protest. Brown compares the Kommune I and the K1-Ost, which emerged on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall in the late 1960s. Whereas both communes were dedicated to revolutionizing both private spaces and the public sphere with their provocative actions and living arrangements, Brown emphasizes the vastly different political environment the East German variant operated in. Although heavily influenced by its Western counterpart, the K1-Ost ultimately could not reconcile the tension between (counter)cultural activity and political activism. Consequently, its search for political change eventually led the group to cooperate with the regime.

Haumann, on the other hand, describes how activists in Italy and West Germany adopted and used a romanticized image of Native Americans to express their dissatisfaction with existing cultural conventions. For both the Indiani Metropolitani and the Stadtindianer, Native Americans embodied a utopian existence liberated from social restrictions and middle-class values, as well as harmony with nature. These groups’ quests for an alternative society and their search for free, autonomous spaces ultimately grew into a youth centered movement that would foreshadow many youth protest issues in Europe in the following decades.

The third section, The Media-Staging of Protest, covers a topic that has become a core issue in 1960s protest research: the complex interrelationship between protests and the media. 1968 was the first social movement operating in an increasingly globalized media landscape whose participants were clearly aware of how coverage of their issues and of the movement itself affected public opinion. It is therefore widely considered to be the first movement that protested against the established mass media while closely cooperating with them.⁸ 1968 marked the dawn of a new age in media history: television had gradually turned into a leading mass medium, initiating a broad visualization of the public sphere. As a consequence, the audiovisual performance of political events and their significance increased rapidly. This new development promoted the relationship between protests and the media. Television and other visual mass media very quickly discovered the sensational qualities of student protest. At the same time, the media developed a tendency toward greater emotionalization and personalization. It also expanded the intimate sphere both in and through its coverage, finding willing objects to satisfy these needs in the alternative lifestyles of hippies and communes. The activists, on the other hand, discovered the power of media performances and adapted their staging of protest to the logic of media representation. Even though they often fiercely criticized the coverage of their issues and accused the media of manipulating the masses, protesters often used the media to mobilize potential activists and spread their alternative values and lifestyles.

One example of this dialectic is the Dutch Provo Movement as portrayed in Niek Pas’s essay. Provos were not only rejected as folk devils by society, as the famous thesis of sociologist Stanley Cohen would have it, but constantly played with their own image in the media and public opinion.⁹ From the summer of 1966 onward, the movement went from being a highly original countercultural movement to a more or less commodified phenomenon. Media reporting all over Europe transformed some Provos into celebrities of the 1960s countercultural movement across the globe, which strengthened its own transnational identity by adopting the Provo’s action repertoire and image.

By examining the media coverage of national and international events of 1968 in the Norwegian mass media, Rolf Werenskjold reinforces the idea that the forms of media reporting had a great influence on what was perceived as the 1968 revolt. He observes that the coverage on the Norwegian TV news was almost completely concerned with demonstrations as dramatic events and showed almost no interest in the underlying causes of the unrest. The different actors, issues, and the social movements participating in the revolt, therefore, remained almost invisible. Yet, the coverage of the international events nonetheless contributed to the framing of national protest and shaped Norwegian public opinion concerning the protest movements of the late 1960s.

Corina L. Petrescu sheds a different light on the role of the media and their relationship to the articulation of dissent. In Eastern Europe, Communist parties and leaders used state television and newspapers to control their public images and to officially address the citizens and even the international community of states. Prompted by the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Romania’s Secretary General of the Communist Party Nicolae Ceausescu gave a speech on 21 August 1968, criticizing the actions of the Warsaw Pact countries and declaring Romania’s independence from the Soviet Union. By analyzing the coverage of Ceausescu’s speech in two daily newspapers, Petrescu shows how the media mirrored the internal enthusiasm generated by Ceausescu’s action. This underscores the fact that Romanian protest in 1968, unlike that of Western Europe and the U.S., did not denote domestic disapproval of the establishment but rather acceptance of it in order to express dissatisfaction with the Soviet Union’s international interventionalism.

The fourth section, Discourses of Liberation and Violence, takes us into the 1970s and examines discourses of armed struggle and solidarity within the different left-wing circles. It is an under-researched chapter of the 1960s and its aftermath, not least because it often generates political controversy. In Germany, for instance, until recently, many researchers regarded the turn toward political violence around 1969/1970 as a case of a small fringe group taking a wrong track during the disintegration of the protest movement. Groups like the Red Army Faction and their supporters and sympathizers were considered to be hardly representative of (tendencies in) 1960s protest. Nowadays, in contrast, most prominent researchers accept and stress the centrality of the topos of armed struggle in the mental world of the protest movement. Hamburg historian Wolfgang Kraushaar, for example, points to Rudi Dutschke’s theoretical contributions to the development of violent action methods.¹⁰ In his eyes, violence was the secret magnetic field of the movement of ‘68’. . . . It had the most powerful and at the same time most abysmal attraction.¹¹ Bielefeld historian Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey mentions another aspect, the glorification of the aesthetics of violence within the protest movements introduced around 1960 by the avant-garde artists’ group, the Situationists.¹²

In response to these new trends, this final section opens with Karen Steller Bjerregaard describing Danish solidarity with the Cuban Revolution as part of a broader solidarity with the Third World. This solidarity with Cuba, Bjerregaard stresses, was integral to the left-wing protest cultures of the 1960s and 1970s, having both a political and cultural side. Castro’s Cuba was seen as the realization of a third path in the 1960s, apart from Western capitalism and Soviet communism, a manifest utopia. In the 1970s, forced by economic necessity to give up its own claims to leadership within the socialist world and to rally behind the banner of official dogmatic Soviet style communism, Havana no longer offered an alternative to Moscow. Nonetheless, cultural activities with a focus on Cuba flourished and kept the revolution alive as an object of hope and revolutionary role model.

In his contribution, Sebastian Gehrig then investigates the debates about terrorism within the protest milieus in West Berlin and Frankfurt from which the Red Army Faction and other terrorist groups originated. Gehrig begins by showing the close connection between the terrorist groups and the wider protest milieus in the formative years of terrorism around 1970. Moreover, he explores terrorists’ ongoing relationship with the circles they came from. Members of these circles found distancing themselves from their violent comrades difficult. They often criticized terrorism because it hurt their cause: the state’s countermeasures targeted the whole protest movement. Nevertheless, most of these critics felt connected to the perpetrators, often secretly admiring their revolutionary zeal. The RAF was able to capitalize on these feelings when its first generation of terrorists was arrested by generating a myth of martyrdom around these imprisoned members. An RAF solidarity movement formed, which hindered critical discussions about terrorism within the radical Left. It took the RAF’s murderous campaign of 1977, which culminated in the hijacking of a German tourist plane, to move the original protest milieus to openly reject the strategy of terrorism.

Jacco Pekelder finishes this section with a story of several left-wing activists in the Netherlands that demonstrates the ability of both the RAF and other West German terrorist groups to mobilize support and solidarity outside of Germany. These activists, among them academics and scientists, medical doctors, and lawyers broadened the RAF solidarity movement beyond West Germany to other European countries at a very early stage. German RAF lawyers actively promoted these activities since they generated foreign pressure that would help their clients, but prominent Dutch activists had their own particular reasons for sympathizing with the RAF. For example, one activist group of Dutch scientists and academics was primarily motivated by anti-psychiatry tendencies; they sought to undermine institutions like psychiatric hospitals and penitentiaries. Already in the early 1970s, this interest had brought an anti-psychiatric patients’ collective in Heidelberg to their attention, and this group, in turn, had eventually put them in touch with RAF supporters.

All three authors in this section aim to broaden the contextualization of their topics to open up new perspectives on the protest movement of the 1960s and 1970s. They all discuss how solidarity with terrorism or the national liberation movements of the Third World was closely linked to activists’ interpretations of their own society and the world they lived in. Bjerregaard calls this the utopian aspect of Third World solidarity: activists believed that the armed struggle in the Third World would help bring about fundamental changes in Western societies and individuals. Gehrig, for his part, points out that terrorists were tied to their milieus of origin not by a shared belief in terrorism as a practical revolutionary strategy, but by a shared image of the state as an evil entity. Pekelder agrees, noting that Dutch activists’ support for the RAF had a lot to do with how they perceived their own situation. In the 1970s, most 1960s radicals believed that a conservative backlash had set in throughout the West. Under the guise of modernization and liberalization, they thought, Western governments were transforming state institutions into technologically advanced, Orwellian, citizen-control structures. They no longer viewed the modern Western state as a promoter of progress but as an instrument of oppression. In the eyes of the Dutch, Danish, and German activists, the fate of the Cuban Revolution and the plight of RAF prisoners, for example, seemed to augur future events at home and abroad.

Like this final section, this volume, on the whole, advocates broader contextualization of popular political activity and offers a multidimensional perspective on protest movements. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey’s epilogue on the French intellectual Régis Debray and Rolf Werenskjold’s chronology of the European 1968 further this end by emphasizing how international events and relationships fundamentally shaped activists’ attitudes. Thus, this book constitutes part of the process of integrating the story of the protest movements of 1960–1980 into a larger historical narrative of postwar Europe encompassing the continent’s complex internal and external history during the Cold War. To be sure, this story continues to have many blank spaces, and this volume, which deals almost exclusively with leftist movements, will be unable to fill them all. More research is needed to incorporate not only the whole political spectrum but also broader segments of society, including the government, trade unions, faith-based organizations, and the cultural field, as well as other branches of the nonprofit sector, and constitutional and legal developments, into this history. It is our hope that the innovative contributions in this collection will inspire further research in this direction.

Notes

1.     Erwin Breßlein, Das IX. Weltjugendfestival (Sofia 1968), in: idem, Drushba! Freundschaft? Von der Kommunistischen Jugendinternationale zu den Weltjugendfestspielen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1973) 125–158; Karin Taylor, Socialist Orchestration of Youth: The 1968 Sofia Youth Festival and Encounters on the Fringe, Ethnologia Balkanica 7 (2003).

2.     For details on these episodes, see Schöne Schweine, Der Spiegel, 5 August 1968, 22; Wolfgang Kraushaar, ed., Frankfturter Schule und Studentenbewegung. Von der Flaschenpost bis zum Molotowcocktail, 1946–1995, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Rogner & Bernhard, 1998) 350f. For descriptions of similar transnational encounters, see Paulina Bren, 1968 in East and West: Visions of Political Change and Student Protest, in: Gerd-Rainer Horn and Padraic Kenney, eds., Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004) 119–35.

3.     For a recent overview, see Belinda Davis, What’s Left? Popular Political Participation in Postwar Europe, American Historical Review 113 (April 2008) 363–390.

4.     Hanco Jürgens, Jacco Pekelder and Falk Bretschneider, Einleitung: ‘1968’ als transnationale Kulturrevolution," in: idem, and Klaus Bachmann, eds., Eine Welt zu gewinnen! Formen und Folgen der 68er Bewegung in Ost- und Westeuropa (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2009) 7–18.

5.     See Philipp Gassert and Martin Klimke, 1968: Memories and Legacies of a Global Revolt (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2009); Ingo Cornils and Sarah Waters, eds., Memories of 1968: International Perspectives (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010).

6.     See, for example, Etienne Francois, 1968: Ein europäisches Jahr? (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1997); Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–c.1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er-Bewegung: Deutschland, Westeuropa, USA (Munich: Beck, 2001); Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, eds., Between Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960–1980 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006); Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, eds., 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Norbert Frei, 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (Munich: DTV, 2008); Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, 1968: Eine Zeitreise (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998): Jens Kastner and David Mayer, eds., Weltwende 1968? Ein Jahr aus globalgeschichtlicher Perspektive (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2008); Karen Dubinsky et al., eds., New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009); Martin Klimke, The ‘Other’ Alliance: Global Protest and Student Unrest in West Germany and the U.S., 1962–1972 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Belinda Davis, Martin Klimke, Carla MacDougall, and Wilfried Mausbach, eds., Changing the World, Changing the Self: Political Protest and Collective Identities in 1960/70s West Germany and the United States (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010).

7.     Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational, in: Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, eds., The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 1047–1055.

8.     Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Protest-Inszenierungen: Visuelle Kommunikation und kollektive Identitäten in Protestbewegungen (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002).

9.     See Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972).

10.   Wolfgang Kraushaar, Rudi Dutschke und der bewaffnete Kampf, in: idem, Karin Wieland and Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Rudi Dutschke, Andreas Baader und die RAF (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005) 13–50.

11.   Wolfgang Kraushaar, Achtundsechzig. Eine Bilanz (Berlin: Propyläen, 2008). See Gerd Koenen, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader. Urszenen des deutschen Terrorismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003); Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005); and Jacco Pekelder, Implosionen eines Stils. Gruppenprozesse mit tödlichem Ausgang: Die Geschichte der RAF wird kulturell, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 October 2004.

12.   Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Vis Ludens, in: Nicole Colin, Beatrice de Graaf, Jacco Pekelder and Joachim Umlauf, eds., Der deutsche Herbst und die RAF in Politik, Medien und Kunst. Nationale und internationale Perspektiven (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2008) 55–64.

Part I

Politics between East and West

Chapter 1

Out of Apathy

Genealogies of the British New Left

in a Transnational Context, 1956–1962

Holger Nehring

Introduction

This chapter traces the intellectual genealogies and meanings of the British New Left. The focus is on the first phase of the New Left, from its origins in 1956 to its decline in the early 1960s. Two approaches in particular dominate the history of the origins of the New Left. The first of these assumes that New Left ideas depended on the complete abandonment of old Left positions, involving a wholly new political language and culture.¹ In contrast, other historians have assumed that activists’ transitions from party membership to New Left participation were seamless.²

Unlike many accounts that link the British New Left directly with processes of political liberalization and the emergence of affluent and permissive societies, this chapter highlights the rather ambiguous character of New Left ideas by locating them in British Communist and socialist traditions. This chapter aims to demonstrate how British New Left activists created a novel form of socialism by working through what they regarded as Socialist (and in particular Marxist) traditions. Hence, rather than interpreting the British New Left as part of a European, if not worldwide transnational movement, this chapter develops a more nuanced reading of its transnational character, by bringing out the multiple layers through which the British New Left was connected beyond borders.³ First, many of its activists could look back on transnational biographies in the British Empire; second, some even continued to advocate transnational campaigns that would endow British national identity with a transnational mission to lead the world toward socialism; and third, they were involved in processes of transnational communication and observation. Fundamentally, the emergence of the New Left was intimately connected to the international history of the time: 1956, marked by the three key events of Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in which he admitted Stalinist atrocities during the 1930s; the crushing of the Hungarian civil rights campaigners with the help of Soviet tanks; and the British-French war with Egypt over the Suez Canal. These events no longer seemed to fit into the bipolar framework of the Cold War, and they set into motion processes of discussion that had an impact on organizations such as the Communist Party, which were modeled upon this bipolar coding of politics.

The so-called New Left began its life as a loose network of activists around the journals Reasoner/New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review (ULR), later the New Left Review, and around the New Left clubs and coffee houses, which were established in late 1950s and early 1960s. Although the boundaries were quite fluid, two main groups can be distinguished, one around the historians Edward P. Thompson and John Saville, based primarily in the north of England and consisting mainly of former Communist Party members. After the violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet forces, as well as Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s atrocities in his Secret Speech at the Twentieth CPSU Party Congress, they left the party. Most of them then gathered around the journal New Reasoner.

The second strand of the New Left first emerged around the Caribbean Rhodes Scholar Stuart Hall, who was to become a famous cultural sociologist, and other students in at the University of Oxford’s Labour Club and their journal Universities and Left Review. They were interested in revitalizing the British Labour movement and were its most vocal spokesmen. Both movements pooled their efforts by founding a common journal, the New Left Review, in 1959/60, thus tapping the tradition of the Left Review, a radical journal of the 1930s.⁴ Both sections were united in their desire to move, in the words of one of their first joint publications, out of apathy by circumventing the organizational straightjackets of the Communist and Labour parties and championing more direct political activism. This political activism would, they pointed out, no longer be concerned with Cold War politics, but rather with overcoming the boundaries of Cold War political discourses by moving beyond the Cold War.⁵

This chapter does not regard the New Left as a homogeneous entity, as it emerged as a product of dynamic political processes. It focuses, therefore, on the conditions and processes under which the unstable ordering of multiple possibilities becomes temporarily fixed in such a way as to enable individuals and groups to behave as a particular kind of agency.⁶ Such social-boundary processes were plausible to contemporaries because they rested upon a set of symbolic resources that were not as novel as the label New Left suggests, but harked back to Socialist and Communist traditions. These traditions were not simply out there to be discovered. Rather, the activists actively rediscovered and re-appropriated them.⁷ The historical antecedents to which New Left activists referred ranged from nineteenth-century anarchism and Owenite socialism, through the Popular Front and the Left Book Club of the 1930s, to the social reformer G.D.H. Cole’s Guild Socialism. The New Left, therefore, comprised both political activism and challenges to the dominant language, the dominant political codes, and the shape of social practices.

This chapter will begin its exploration by examining the role of what the activists regarded as traditional elements in the various groups of the New Left before highlighting the problems this implied for developing a common identification amongst New Left activists as well as for transnational relations with other movements.

Communism and the New Left

Looking back to what became the origins of the New Left, John Saville remarked that "the idea of resigning from the Communist Party was not in our minds when we began the Reasoner and it was only in the following months that we recognized, with great reluctance, the fundamental conservatism, not only of the leadership, but also of the rank and file."⁸ Some of this criticism goes back to the immediate postwar years, when activists, such as the historian of the English Revolution of 1688, Christopher Hill, had expressed his skepticism toward the unthinking application of the Stalinist organizational model to the British context and had emphasized the importance of uniting morality and political activism.⁹

Indeed, for many of those who left it in the aftermath of 1956, the British Communist Party (CPGB) had been a political, personal, and emotional home. Abandoning the party meant giving up friendships and leaving feelings of community behind.¹⁰ In the specific international environment of the mid 1960s, these activists did not, like the writer George Orwell or the intellectual Arthur Koestler before him, become staunch anti-Communists. Instead, they came to play a key role as activists who developed an alternative to virulent anti-communism, defining a space between the polarities of political debate in the Cold War. While they abandoned certain elements of the Communist (in particular Stalinist) heritage, they retained and elaborated some aspects of this experience in a new context.

The development of what came to be called the New Left was not a straightforward process but often involved personally hurtful experiences. It started with the publication of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, which became known in Britain in late spring and early summer 1956. In the speech, Khrushchev had criticized the Stalinist purges and the Stalinist cult of leadership more generally. The process continued with what many regarded as the lukewarm response of the Communist CPGB to these challenges. It culminated in the Soviet intervention in Hungary in autumn 1956, backed by the CPGB leadership, which conjured up memories of the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 and the Soviet intervention in Finland during World War II. This dissatisfaction resulted in a loss of around 9,000 members or 28 percent of the membership by 1 January 1958: around 2,000 left in the wake of the Khrushchev speech, another 5,000 quit over Hungary, and around 2,000 resigned after disappointments at the Twenty-fifth CPGB Congress.¹¹

The activists not only moved away from the party out of their own volition, they were also pushed out after being identified as a distinct group that sought to wreck the Communist project by the CPGB leadership. By the summer of 1956, John Saville and Edward Thompson had tried to promote intra-party discussions in the correspondence columns of the party’s publications.¹² When this failed, they launched their own journal, the Reasoner. After the first issue in July 1957, the CPGB’s Yorkshire district committee instructed the editors to close it down, but by then Saville and Thompson knew that it had met needs amongst party activists: it sold out within weeks, and the 300 letters sent to the journal all supported the initiative.¹³

The transition from identifying themselves as Communist to turning to New Left activism, however, was far more complicated than is usually suggested and did not necessarily involve a complete break from previous orthodoxies. An important part of British communism consisted of a shared sense of purpose and the feeling of mutual sacrifice by party members for the cause. This was only heightened by the social and political isolation which many Communists experienced in Cold War Britain. Coming to terms with the exclusion from their community (which most of them had not planned) and with the sudden collapse of the boundaries which had given their political and social world meaning, was a process which took years rather than months.¹⁴

This feeling of disappointment rarely undermined these core commitments, but was the result of a mixture of political, social, and ideological anxieties: concerning the CPGB leadership’s support for Soviet policies, particularly with regard to the intervention in Hungary in late 1956; the validity of Khrushchev’s argument that the removal of the cult of personality had eradicated the main features of Stalinism; aspects of Soviet history, such as the discovery of widespread anti-Semitism, particularly by Communists in the United States, but also by the CPGB activist Hyman Levy on his journeys through the Soviet Union; and not least, by the reluctance of the party leadership to allow a genuine debate to take place about all these issues in the mainstream party press.¹⁵

Hence, the diffuse opposition which arose against the Stalinist line of the CPGB’s leadership in responding to Khrushchev’s Secret Speech argued in terms of Communist loyalty and traditions. The continued belief that the party would respond and reflect their members’ expectations fired their indignation. The activists’ initial objective was, therefore, reform.¹⁶ With their submissions to the Commission of Inner-Party Democracy which the CPGB leadership had set up in order to fend off criticism, they intended to strengthen the party, rather than weaken it.¹⁷

The process of breaking away from the CPGB was neither caused nor encouraged by the development of a coherent alternative model of political organization which aimed to replace the democratic centralism of the CPGB. Amongst those who produced a minority report to the CPGB’s Commission on Democracy (the historians Christopher Hill and Peter